mountshang

A journal of weekly trips to various art museums and galleries in Chicago.

Monday, April 30, 2007

My Friend Misha

I just had to whip out the camerawhen I saw Misha lurking in the shadows of our club's studiocold-staring at his figures,(he's working on both simultaneously from the same model)as he queries the Almighty:

"What needs to be fixed? "

Misha labors under the same burden as myself,being the son of a more talented (but still obscure) father-artist

And, like myself, he is a mass of contradictions:

He's not religious -- but he's a member of two temples.He fled USSR 25 years ago - but he thinks "Buuuush" is even worse.He's an obsessive artist,but seems to be even more obsessive about fixing old beatersor programming his computer.

He's a humbugthrough and through("what is humbug?" I can hear him ask in his thick Russian/Hebrew accent)

and with my dancing Nordic eyes,I'll just smile back at him.

"We're all humbugs",he will finally conclude,and I will have to nod in agreement.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Artopolis 2007: Outsider and Folk Art

In my fourth hour of wandering through the 5 showsof the first Chicago Artopolis event,I came across this figureby a barely known carver from Ranger, Texasnamed W. L.Bourdeau.

There are many, different reasons for liking something,and maybe exhaustion had something to dowith why I found this piece so attractive.

It's such a contrastto the overwhelming themeof the the 10,000 pieces I'd already passed that day,each trying to be stranger and more disturbing than the next

While I do get the feeling that old W.L.was just trying to please himselfwith the things he liked to contemplate,like the bodies of young women

or the eternal dramas of family life.

These thing were dated 1955-1960,but the gallery offered no other informationabout the artist -- his anonymityqualifying him as a genuine folk artist.

(although, in a reality check, there's only 2500 souls in Ranger, Texas,a rural town on the dusty road from Fort Worth to Abilene,people named Bourdeau still live there,and I'm sure Lori drives through there every month. )

W.L. was well within the dominant trend ofAmerican sculpture of the 30's and 40's,so even if he didn't go to art school (and maybe he did),he had to have some connection to the artworld of his time.

Maybe that's why his work really isn't selling for very much.(at $2800 retail for a 17" carving,he still wouldn't be able to live off his sculpture,even in Ranger Texas)

And unlike the really famous outsider artists(like our very own Henry Darger ), he doesn't seem to have been a borderline psychotic.

Friday, April 20, 2007

The Use and Abuse of Anatomy

This is really a post about Gustinus Ambrosi (1893-1975)whom I just re-discovered (above) last week in an auction house catalog.

I say "rediscovered" -- because, to my own surprise,he was already on my own website -- his portrait of Gerhard Hauptmann being just one of many that the famous author commissioned on his own behalf.

But it also begs comparisonwith other sculpture of this period that worked sodiligently with the details of human anatomy --

and given my ornery nature, I picked the above piece(by Rudolph Tegners (1873-1950))from my English friend, Robert Mileham's website

When I first saw this piece,at the head of his post called "Art's best kept secret",I thought he was being facetious -- I thought it was a gag --

because the piece seems sobroken - overwrought -- and utterly miserable to me.Full of pinched, unhappy body shapes,completely divorced from the surrounding base,perhaps serving as a fine example ofmelodramatic desperation(has the poor thing been tied to the train tracks ?)

I've been wanting to talk about that Tegners piece ever since,and I suppose the most successful contrastwould be with Auguste Rodin(but he's so famous, everyone already knows thatthey need to bow and scrape before him)

But who's ever heard of Gustinus Ambrosi from Vienna ?Actually, he was quite a famous sculptor in his day,and there's still a museum for him in his home town.

He completed about 2,500 sculptures including 600 portrait busts !(and although his handicap is possibly irrelevant to sculpture,he became deaf at the age of seven)

Maybe you could call his work"fanciful naturalism" ---since there's certainly a plethora of muscles and tendons,but I don't think he's too concerned aboutputting them into realistic places.

(like --- what happened to that poor man's neck ?For me, it makes for a good sculpture,but I doubt he'll ever stand up straight again!)

And what about this poor guy ?His face has shriveled like a prune --but still I'm enjoying him

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Ashevek Tunnillie

So I've been browsing the web for Inuit sculpture... and, so far, Ashevek Tunnillie is the one who gives me pleasure

As you may guessed by now -- he specializes in bears.

I don't know whether polar bears still visit Cape Dorset,quite possibly one can get much closer to them at my local zoo( they're one of my favorite animals to see there--since the Lincoln Park Zoo offers an underwater viewing window)

They're so sleek and powerful --just like these little sculptures.

And as you see with these multiple views --Ashevek is composing these pieces all-the-way-around

..and he does pretty well with human figures as well --compelling characterization --and delicious design---what more could we want ?

Here he is (born 1956) -- in his native habitat(or maybe not -- his pieces are in galleries around the world --he could probably afford to live anywhere he wanted --and if I were him -- I'd spend at least part of the yearSOMEWHERE WARMER !!!)

As the internet shows, the market for Eskimo sculpture is a large one...even the best pieces sell for under $8,000,and most of it is unredeemable drek,clumsy, awful things that look far worse thanthe original chunks of stone from which they were cut.

But I'd say that Ashevek is a great sculptor.

Here's a good piece by his cousin, Oviloo (what a name!),and it looks like several generations of Tunnillies werecarving stone in the 20th C.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Nathan Rapoport

I'd never heard of Nathan Rapoport until last week,but I first saw his sculpture about 25 years ago,since the Park Avenue Synagogue is located between my grandmother's apartmenton 88th at Lexington-- and the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Ave at 82nd.

This facade dedicated to Janusz Korczak, ''The King of Children'', wassomething of an anomaly when it was made in 1980,since figure sculpture had been banished from architecture forat least 30 years by that time(and it had been banished from Jewish temples forever)

It had design -- it had drama,it had a kind of sweet dreaminess.

It was doing its job.

And now I've learned that the sculptor's careergoes back to this piece dedicated in 1948to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

I can't find a bio for Rapoport on the web -- so all I've got is an the introductory essay written by a journalist, Richard Yaffe. We're told about his grandfathers (both Chassidim - a cantor and butcher) but what about his parents ? We're told he went to the Warsaw Academy of Art -- but how long was he there ? He was 28 when Poland was invaded, and the story is told that he set out on foot to find and join the Polish army, but for some curious reason, he took a portofolio of his work with him -- which he showed to Soviet authorities, some of whom, from the Minsk Art Commission, invited him to Minsk -- where he must have joined the Artist's Union becausehe worked on a monument to Stalin (who else ?) with Abram Brazer (1892-1942)

There, he attracted the attention of a miltary official, Kulagin (first name ?), who protected and patronized him throughout the war years. His first great monument was this tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto - begun in 1943, and eventually erected after the war in 1945using "splendid Labrador granite, ordered cut originally by Arno Breker, for a monument to commemorate Hitler's victory"

Then he went to Israel, beginning with a monument to a Anilewicz, a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto - to commemorate a Kibbutz destroyed in the Egyptian war, Yad Mordechai. He went on to make other monuments in Isreal as well as Philadelphia, New York, and Toronto.

But whatever happened to his career as a Soviet sculptor ? Did he defect ? Did he become an Israeli citizen ? And whatever happened to General Kulagin ? I wish someone in his family would put up a website to answer all these questions !

Here's some details from the Warsaw monument(which, incidentally, was reproduced in Yad Vashem, Israel)

There's that same kind of passionate idealism I found here in the 19the C. Jewish sculptor from Baltimore (whom I'm sure Rapoport had never seen), and that sorrowful intensity of the early 20th C. sculptor Glicenstein as well.

It's not cool Classical -- it's not detached.

But it also feels -- well -- small and broken

a little like the puffery of a cartoon character

But it does have its moments -like this doomed hero -- and how it compareswith Arno Breker's doomed Nazi hero shown here

This is the monument to Anilewicz, another one of Rapoport's doomed heroes.

And isn't that best kind ?( failure being proof of the challenge undertaken)

I look at this -- and hear the theme song from "Exodus"swelling up in the background.

I guess you could call this "movie sculpture"

This is quite a monument, isn't it ?It's really become part of a landscape

My friend from Iowa recognizes these as silos(but even a half-jew like myself can see that they're giant torah scrolls!)

Look at the size of these things!

They're not boring -- but I'm not sure they will have the after-lifethat ancient Assyrian reliefs, for example, have in art museums.

(in contrast to these dramatic reliefs by another 20th C. sculptor, Emilio Greco.)

About Me

I live life dangerously by ignoring the advice of Chuang Tzu: "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger". Badly spoiled by my wife, I spend mornings in sculpture studio, afternoons in record shop, evenings on the internet, weekends at the Palette and Chisel Academy and Art Institute of Chicago, and, the time spent in between, reading world literature. Am currently focused on the Middle East and South Asia.